sleepyjeff is suffucient.....I dropped the the ages ago.

As to your point I will concede that my observence does offer little to the actual argument at hand but still assert that we have progressed in a positive direction by the very fact that what we get all in a huff about these days is, in my most humble opinion, pretty tame compared to what we were concerned with just a generation or two ago.

Wheras in my opinion the failure to learn the lessons of McCarthyism shows we've progressed very little at all over a few generations.

Except that it certainly did. You may not see it that way, but I do.

Again, your opinion. I think it contributes just fine in that it is an interesting point and good food for thought. And I am sorry that you do not see progress simply because we have not reached a utopia, but that doesn't mean that it is not here. You say that it is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant that we are no longer killing each other over slavery. I say that these are both clear signs that we have progressed as a society. But then, I'm not a pessimist nor do I have to be overly critical and dismissive of society in order to feel intellectually significant.

It doesn't presuppose anything. Pouring water over a bad guys face until he starts sputtering is nowhere near as severe or horrific as killing hundreds or even thousands of innocent people with nuclear radiation. As I said earlier, the world is not black and white and bad doesn't just equal bad. There are measures of severity. If there weren't we'd either electrocute shoplifters or give rapists a $50 fine.

Aww, thanks!
Just trying to lighten the tone and all.

Who says we haven't? Who is being hunted down? Who is being blacklisted for their political beliefs? What "scare" are we being pushed into believing? Or are you implying that because Bush, who may be the President but is still one person, somehow represents and is indicative of the actions and beliefs of our nation's citizens as a whole? If so, I would disagree. The very fact that there is so much public debate and vocal opposition to his actions shows that McCarthyism is dead. Bush may be ignorant, but that doesn't mean the whole country is, and his firing of one person hardly demonstrates that McCarthyism is alive and well.

Where the heck did I deny that progress has been made or that the world is black and white, or that there aren't levels of severity.

All I'm saying is that whether there have been worse things in the past has absolutely nothing to do with how bad something else is. Rape is not less of a bad thing because at some point in the past we engaged in human sacrifice. All that changes is the prioritization of which bad things get the most attention. Yes, in a world where we are simultaneously dropping nuclear bombs on innocent civilians and waterboarding, the former is what you stop first. But that doesn't make the waterboarding any less bad, just less of a priority.

Yes, it is a good thing if an issue gets resolved allowing us to move to the next item on the list. But that doesn't diminish the importance of that next item.

(And again, as was my original response, the specific example provided by sleepyjeff is not one where any actual progress has been made. The moral questions about the neutron bomb remain open and unanswered and not irrelevant since our previous possession of them and stated willingness to use them in certain situations has contributed to widespread Arabic conspiracy theories that we have, in fact, used them; particularly in the first Gulf War.)

And all of that is relatively a side discussion because the charge by Olbermann is not that the administration is using waterboarding. Everybody acknowledges that the administration is using it. That is why Mukasey couldn't answer the question, saying what everybody knows would open us up to war crime prosecutions. I'd say that when you're having to hedge to avoid war crime charges, then we've gone down a bad path (but no, not as bad as the Holocaust). And worse, per Olbermann's view, is that the administration is not only using torture when they know it isn't reliable but using it because they know it is not reliable and will provide the tool by which we are manipulated.

That, if you accept the argument, is the great threat and the big evil in question. But there was once a time we ate the flesh of our enemies to gain their powers, so things really aren't that bad.

Harlan Ellison once said that he always thought of his body as something solid, like a potato, until his bypass operation, which opened his eyes to the one billion little things that delicately held him together.

In much the same way, I think that as each successive generation learns and more about the shortcomings and sees more of the failures of their elected officials (now unfolding in REAL TIME in the blogosphere) and the uneasy and awkward position that we find ourselves in at the very tippy top of the world food chain, we find it all too tempting to blame the government, and they're an easy target, just because they are sad, stupid, self-absorbed and utterly incompetent. And we put them there...

The mess the world is in right now is bigger than Bush - it existed before he took office, though he and his merry men quickly accelerated it - and it isn't going to magically all get better once there's a new administration. We are on a one way track unless this country finds a new way to hold hands and play nice with the other superpowers and stop bickering over stupid things that really don't matter. There needs to be a real international plan to save the planet and all the nice animals that we're driving to extinction, or we are sadly doomed to extinction, like the giant, talking, highly intelligent but ill-tempered amphibians who invented dentistry, public transportation and moisturizing lotion while they ruled the planet long before we ever got here..

Our only hope may be MAGNIFICATION.

Heehee, public mojo to Boss Radio for some thought and laugh provoking contributions.

Thank you, ISM.

Right back at ya!